The Cranes Dance

by Meg Howrey

  I told Gwen the news the next day, right before rehearsal, like a guilty boyfriend breaking up with his girl in public so she won’t cause a scene. To my surprise, Gwen threw her arms around me.

  “Oh my god! I’m so excited for you!”

  She was jumping around so much I had to jump too, or be knocked over.

  “I can totally see it!” Gwen laughed. “You’re gonna get married to him and have a million babies. I’ll be crazy Aunt Gwen!”

  “I’m just moving in with him,” I said, alarmed.

  “It’s what I wanted for you,” Gwen gushed. “I was hoping this would happen. I knew it would.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course,” Gwen said, smugly, as if she had arranged the whole thing. “Oh my god, I’m so excited I have to pee.” She ran into the bathroom, leaving me in the hallway, slightly stunned. After a minute, I went in and found her sobbing over the sinks. There were a couple of other people in there. Someone, I forget who, was trying to pat her on the back.

  “Okay,” I said, waving everyone off. “Okay. She’s okay.”

  “I’m okay!” Gwen choked out. “I’m okay!”

  It’s not a totally unusual thing, meltdowns in the bathroom. People carried on with their business. Gwen stopped crying. I wet a paper towel and wiped her face. I smoothed her hair.

  “Oh gosh,” Gwen whispered, when everyone had left the bathroom. “I don’t know what happened! That was weird.”

  We went into rehearsal. Gwen seemed totally calm. I was a wreck.

  When Marius is working on something new, he frequently sounds like he’s asking for input, but he’s not really. He’s talking to himself. So if he stops and says something like “And now what should you do here?” the standard thing is to say nothing but just sort of hold yourself in readiness while he figures out the answer. There are only a few of us who will offer suggestions. I might be one of the very few. Maybe the only one, now. That day Marius was working out the bit where Juliet pleads with her mother not to have to marry Paris, and Lady Capulet totally gives her the cold shoulder. Marius had Gwen running at me and flinging herself into my arms, and me icily peeling her hands off my shoulders.

  “And then you slide down her body,” Marius instructed Gwen. “Until you are at her feet. And then Kate, that makes you … what?”

  I looked down at Gwen, huddled pathetically at the tips of my pointe shoes, her arms around my ankles. Several options occurred to me. One was to reach down and embrace her, set her on her feet, tell her I would do whatever it took to protect her. Another option was to kick her in the face.

  “Can you sort of step out of her arms?” Marius sketched a movement in front of me. I elaborated on this, letting one foot trail behind me.

  “Yes!” Marius nodded. “Right. And so then Gwen, can you grab that leg? No, higher up. Yes, that’s right. You’re still pleading with her. And Kate, you …”

  I looked down at Gwen’s hand on my leg. Then at Gwen’s face. I wondered how she could look so composed, so businesslike. I myself was shaking.

  “Perfect,” Marius said. “That’s exactly the right feeling. And so, having your mother look at you like that, Gwen, that’s what makes you let go. You know she’s not going to help you.”

  17.

  Marius came today to watch David and me rehearse the Titania/Oberon pas de deux. We got about thirty-two bars into it before Marius stopped us, waving a hand at Dmitri to stop playing and jumping up from his chair.

  “This love is autumn, not spring,” he said, pushing his giant gold watch up his forearm, intent, electrified. “This isn’t young love. Young love is given. Mature love is earned. This is mature love.”

  How do you dance mature love? I wondered. What would that look like? I pictured Titania coming onstage with a hot water bottle, inquiring about Oberon’s sciatica. Usually I enjoy it when Marius goes all arty and talks about abstract notions or character development, but today I just wanted to dance and get it over with.

  “Young lovers grab at each other,” Marius continued, looking at David. “You can’t wait to get your hands all over her, it’s greedy and loud.” Marius turned to me, and for an extremely bizarre moment I thought he was actually going to demonstrate this with me. I was totally unprepared and it sent a wave of heat through my body. I haven’t felt that in a while. I’ve been under the impression that my sexuality is in deep freeze.

  “But mature love …” Marius took my hand, looked me in the eyes, and smiled. Brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. I wasn’t sure what to do, how to respond. I couldn’t think of a gesture that signified mature love as differentiated from the other kinds of love.

  “So, less passionate?” David asked.

  Marius started humming a phrase and marking through the choreography. I followed along. When we got to the first lift he got a good grip on my hips and said, “Do,” so I pliéd and up I went. Marius was always a good partner. He wrapped an arm around my legs, securing me against his torso, and started walking backward. Some lifts you have to be supporting some of your weight with your arms, or working hard to keep your center or make a platform for the guy’s hands with your back or thigh or whatever, but this one was one of those nice floaty lifts that Marius is good at choreographing and where you feel quite beautiful doing it. Does mature love include the almost childlike pleasure in being picked up and carried? Marius slid me down close against his chest. I was supposed to fall back then, and I started the movement, arching my upper body, but Marius stopped me, keeping me upright and facing him, pressed against his chest, hands flat against my scapula. I could feel his heart beating under his soft T-shirt. I felt almost sleepy. Marius softened his hands and I arched back, Marius lunged with me, then brought us both back to standing.

  “See?” Marius said, over my shoulder to David. “Still passion, but passion with authority. Titania and Oberon know each other very well. They’ve been fighting and now they’ve been reconciled so there’s a relief. A deeper harmony. Acceptance. Titania has given in to Oberon’s demands with the full knowledge that next time it will be him giving in, but it really doesn’t matter all that much. There’s almost a sense of humor here—a kind of ‘Yes, darling, you are a piece of work and I’m a pompous old windbag, but we’re a pair, you and I, and life is better when we stick together.’ ”

  Marius turned back to me. “I’m speaking of the characters,” he said with a smile. “Of course.”

  Marius walked back to his chair. David and I studied each other for a moment. It’s hard to translate these kinds of notes immediately into the body. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. We are neither poetry nor prose, exactly. We have gestures for tenderness, and sincerity. Denial. Rage. Passion. A gesture for true love. A gesture for betrayal. But it’s a limited emotional vocabulary. You can think of metaphors before and after you dance, but it’s hard to dance a metaphor in real time. Between my neck and my fatigue and my nerves and my fear, I wasn’t sure if I was even capable of an adjective.

  “It’s the mood,” Marius said. “Just be human with each other.”

  We began the pas de deux again, and this time Marius didn’t stop us. Something must have seeped into both of us, because it did feel quite different. David and I kept sort of smiling at each other, and everything went much more securely. It felt great, actually. So real. Like we were human beings. I wished I had danced more like this from the beginning of my career, when I wasn’t so beat up. We finished and separated, catching our breath, looking up to nod at each other, then turning to Marius, who was squinting.

  “It doesn’t … quite … work,” he said.

  David snorted. I looked down at my feet. They seemed very far away. And so sad. The veins stood out in vivid blue relief to the pale skin. I shifted my weight to the backs of my heels to give my toes a little breathing room inside my pointe shoes. I wondered how much longer I could remain standing. It didn’t seem like that much longer.

  “It’s not you,” Marius said, jumping out of hi
s chair and pacing. “That was lovely, actually. It was lovely, but it wasn’t Titania and Oberon. I don’t know … hmmmm …”

  When Marius goes to this phase you just let him pace and talk to himself and wait it out, stay ready for instructions. David caught my eye and blew me a silent kiss, then bent over to stretch his hamstring. I calculated that I had about five more minutes of dancing left in my body before I started disintegrating. Less, if I just had to stand around.

  “I think,” I started, not having any real thought formed but out of desperation to keep upright, “I think that was valuable though, in terms of how we are relating to each other? It just needs to be, maybe, it just needs to be more formal.”

  Marius stopped pacing and considered me.

  “You know how after you’ve had a fight,” I continued babbling, “you’re all polite and really respectful and considerate? Well, not me—after I fight I just get sullen and resentful until enough time has passed or I get bored with myself or whatever—but I think that’s how people should behave. You know, in a better …” I waved a hand around the studio. The bare floors, the box of yellow rosin in the corner, Dmitri yawning at the piano, the grime of New York City on the windows too high to see out of, the fluorescent lights blotted with occasional shadows of dead insects, David’s and my dance bags under the barre spewing towels and water bottles and sweatpants and Advil and time. And despair. And fatigue. And desire.

  “In a better world,” I said. “A better world than this one.”

  “A better world,” Marius said.

  “And a better me,” I added. “Obviously.”

  Marius nodded. I looked down at my feet again. This time they appeared to be quite close, almost under my chin. Stand up, I told myself. Stand up.

  “Let’s try it,” Marius said. “From the beginning.”

  18.

  Dress rehearsal today for Program One of our mixed repertoire evenings. In the morning we were all called to company class onstage.

  Swan Lake had disappeared, back into storage. New backdrops had been lowered in. The front of the stage was freshly taped with the markers that help us form properly spaced lines. Portable barres had been brought in, along with a rosin box in the corner. It’s always a bit weird, taking class onstage since you don’t have mirrors. On the other hand, it has sort of a dramatic feel to it.

  A few house lights were on, and you could see the entire theater. Usually all you can see are the green EXIT signs and the shadow thumb shapes that are people’s heads. The orchestra pit was empty, except for Dmitri, at the piano. It’s disorienting to take class without a mirror. And to be onstage without an audience.

  We had an audience today, though. An assortment of elegantly dressed people, sitting in the center orchestra block. This was one of those days, as Marius likes to say, where we were paying some bills.

  Individual sponsorship of dancers has now become a normal thing for ballet companies. You pay a set fee and your name will appear next to a dancer’s name in the program. “Tina Ballerina’s performances are sponsored by Bruce and Brenda Moneybags.” It’s been proven that people will be more generous to the needy if the needy are given an individual face, a personality, a story line they can sympathize with. And it’s not like the dancers have to wear their sponsors’ names on their costumes.

  But Marius has resisted this trend. So our individual donors have to be content with the usual perks: a private bar at the theater, the best seats, meet-the-dancers dinners, invitations to rehearsals, etc., etc. There’s a whole tiered system of Friendship with the company. As in life, some friendships are more meaningful than others.

  And some of them are real friendships. I spotted Wendy Griston Hedges sitting in the third row, wearing what looked like a brown cloche hat. I waved. She waved. I hadn’t seen her in a while, we’d missed a couple of our first-Monday teas. In January she was away, visiting her sister, and in February we were just getting back from tour, and this month …

  That’s when I realized that the first Monday of this month was … yesterday. Did she send me an invitation? Yes, she did. I remember looking at it. Did I even open it? No. No, that was the day I found the numbers under Gwen’s bed. I couldn’t remember what I did with Wendy’s letter.

  Class hadn’t started yet, so I quickly ran down the steps by the side of the orchestra pit and over to Wendy, smiling and waving in a general way to other donors.

  Wendy is extremely shy, and not very physically demonstrative, so we never hug or kiss cheeks or anything like that. She was sitting at the end of a row, and I sat down on my heels in the aisle, holding on to the armrest.

  “Hello,” Wendy said.

  Once I was next to her, I saw that it wasn’t a brown cloche hat.

  “Wendy, your haircut is fabulous!” I told her. I’d gotten used to the cranberry frizz, and our relationship is such that I would never have suggested anything different to her, but it was an incredible improvement. Even her skin, normally quite dry and chalk-ish, was shining with a pearly glow.

  Wendy patted her hair self-consciously.

  “Oh,” she said, with an almost girlish giggle. “Oh, well, thank you.”

  She turned to the woman next to her, a beautiful black woman, ageless except for the gray in her dreadlocks.

  “Kate, this is my friend Karine,” she said.

  I reached across Wendy and shook hands with Karine. My hand disappeared into her giant one. Karine had a West Indian accent. Wendy watched us, alert, smiling nervously. The hallmarks of someone introducing a loved one.

  Wendy in love? There definitely was something … almost bridal about her.

  “Wendy, I feel terrible,” I said in a rush. “Monday. It’s been … I got injured and this season has been and I … I moved. My boyfriend and I—”

  “You’re injured?” she interrupted. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh fine, yes fine. But listen, Monday. I’m so sorry. Can we do this coming Monday?” I was almost pleading, as it suddenly did seem very important that I see Wendy.

  Wendy turned a questioning face to Karine.

  “Monday?” Wendy asked. “Is that … do we …?” She put her hand on top of Karine’s. Despite Wendy’s general glow and fetching new do, her hands looked very old and crabbed. I was glad that she was with someone who didn’t mind, if that’s what was going on.

  “Or … whenever, really,” I said. “I mean … we can pick another time or …”

  “Monday will be just fine,” Karine said to me. “Not too early though, I think.”

  “Oh good.” Wendy beamed. “That will be lovely.”

  “Oh good!” I said, although I was a little concerned now about the relationship. Had Wendy fallen prey to some sort of lesbian heiress hunter? “Good!”

  “We’ll talk then,” Wendy said.

  “Yes. Okay. It’s so good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you, Kate.”

  I vaulted back up the stairs and took my place at the barre. Marius strode onto the stage and welcomed our guests charmingly. We applauded them. Class started. My Vicodin kicked in and I gulped water in between combinations like mad, trying to get rid of the dry-gum feeling. The mood of the company was good, Marius was making his little jokes, people were smiling, showing off a bit. Everyone was doing a stage version of themselves, including me. This is the public version of our lives. Yes, it’s incredibly hard, taxing, draining. Yes, we are super dedicated. But we love what we do. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. And we support one another. It’s a family. And you, lovely well-dressed people in the front rows, you are our generous aunts and uncles, our doting grandparents. You love us. We love you. Especially when you watch. You are our mirrors, reflecting magnificence.

  I think the Vicodin I got from Stefan yesterday is stronger than what Gwen had. I felt a little too high. It was almost fun.

  “Snazzy,” I said to Roger, as we waited to go across on the diagonal.

  “What?”

  “I feel snazzy.” I snapped my f
ingers. “You know. My mojo. I feel it.”

  “Right on,” said Roger. “Or whatever.”

  I zip-zip-zipped across the stage, confident, a little daring, sparkling like a Venetian glass vegetable. I can’t believe I’ve been performing on this shit. It’s a miracle I haven’t tipped off the stage and into the woodwinds. Impaled myself on a bassoon.

  After class, I went to Wardrobe, and Fiona pulled my Leaves costume off the rack.

  “While I have you here,” she said. “Let’s see where we are with the Look At Me dress.” She disappeared into the racks and I stripped off all my junk and stood in my tights and pointe shoes, trying to work a little saliva into my gums. My neck was starting to throb a little. People filtered in and out, grabbing costumes, chattering. I closed my eyes.

  “Hey.” It was Mara, prodding me on my shoulder.

  “Oh hey. Hey!”

  Mara had her Symphony in Three Movements costume on. Well, it’s not really much of a costume, Symphony in Three Movements being prototypical Balanchine modernism so the dancers just wear pale tights and leotards with a little belt around the waist. Mara’s leotard is white.

  “You don’t have a straightening iron, do you?” Mara asked. “The one in the Hair Room is broken and we’re supposed to have high ponytails. It looks like I’ve got a sheep on my head.” She pointed to her curls.

  “There was a character in one of the Oz books,” I told her, “who was like, an evil princess. And she wore the same thing every day. But she had a whole room full of different heads. She collected them. And so when she wanted to look different, she just changed her head.”

  Mara stared at me. I guess I did look a little crazed, standing there naked holding on to my boobs, pouring sweat and gabbling away.

  “Tamara does, I think,” I said. “Have a straightening iron. Check my dressing room.”

  Fiona emerged with a red cocktail-style dress, glittering with beading, and shook it at me.

  “It’s not done,” she said, grabbing pins.

  I watched Mara leave. She seemed a little less friendly than normal. I’ve been neglecting her too. I stepped into the dress and Fiona started fussing with the fit.